So I've picked up DF again recently after being away from some time. The last version I played was 34.11 when the computer I was using stopped working properly. After coming back, I played a few games of 34.11 to relearn how to play the game instead of jumping into a completely new version altogether. While there was a lot of stuff I did remember, there was also a lot of stuff I'd forgotten, and some of the results weren't pretty. The first fortress accidentally breached an aquifer, and I managed to lose another fort to a tantrum spiral, which was the first time that actually happened to me.
I'm running an older computer here, so I don't know exactly how much of the newer stuff it can handle. The wiki unfortunately treats everything from 40.01 to 47.04 as a single version of the game, which seems to be related to save compatibility or something. It doesn't help either when I'm looking up information that it has everything from 40.01 to 47.04 as one version. However, there's been eight years worth of changes and I don't want to try learning all of that at once, and as I said, I want to see what the computer can handle. In particular, I don't know if it can handle the 64-bit stuff, so I'm going to test different releases, though the newer stuff does have 32 bit versions too. From what I can tell, there's at least 4 different versions of the game: 40.25, 44.12, and 47.04 all seem like discrete versions of the game. I'm not sure about 42.x and 43.x though. There's only about 7 months difference between 42.01 and 43.05 so it's possible they're really just all one version of DF with the little additions and bugfixes, but 43.05 is where the jump to 64-bit goes. I don't know if I should go all the way to 43.05 after 40.25 or go to 42.06 or some other intermediate release first.
Also, the legacy releases of the LNP doesn't support every single release, which is fine because because some of the releases do have a lot of bugs and stability problems. Also, I'm not really sure how much of this newer stuff I want to deal with, some of it sounds very complicated, but then like I said, there's about 4 or 5 versions of the game for me to catch up with here. By comparison, when I first played there were only 3 versions of DF.
I've been running a pair of forts in 40.25 to test the first newer (to me anyway) version of DF. In general, I'm mostly enjoying this version of DF. It's still pretty similar to 34.11 but with some new features which are mostly positive.
First, there's the active world. With this, I don't really have to lose a game ever again, I can get the fort to a certain point, retire and start fresh. Instead of playing a fortress, I can play a whole dwarf civilization and build up its holdings around the world, though my understanding is that later versions play that aspect even more strongly, like sending out armies to conquer other sites and stuff. I can sort of set a personal victory condition for my fort, like getting the monarch to arrive or something, and then retire or keep playing until I hit FPS death. It's possible I might hit FPS death before that but instead of just abandoning a fort that's slowed to an unplayable crawl, I can at least retire it and see how long it can last on its own.
I like the trees. They provide a nice amount of timber, and I don't have to clear cut my maps any more for wood. I just have to watch out for digging through roots, or big ass mushrooms growing and wrecking my fort. The new crops and such are interesting, though a number of them are bugged. Tree fruits are good for making booze, but the seeds are a pain in the ass. I can't plant fresh tress, so they're useless, and I can't find a way to sell them individually out of bags. I suppose I could set up a stockpile for just tree seeds so I can sell them out of the bags. I think I'm going to autodump them with DFHack under my atom smasher to get rid of them instead though. I can edit the raws to remove the seeds entirely though, right? Probably just comment out a [SEED] tag on the trees?
I like the additions to the designation menu, particularly for mining. It took a bit of getting used to at first, but marking off spots because getting ready to dig really helps with the planning, and mining priorities are a huge improvement. I found some
old mining designation macros I'd set up and they work even better in 40.25. I can put the exploratory mining pattern and mine shafts in marker mode to set things up in an organized fashion. The housing block macro works great with prioritization -- I can set the priority for the whole thing up at 4 or 5 and then when I'm digging out the initial stuff I can mark stuff I need right now like starting work shops, sleeping areas and small dining rooms to a 1 or a 2. Then the stuff I need right away gets dug out first, and the miners go back to digging out the rest in the background while I'm setting up the fort's basics. Before, I'd run the macro and remove designations to just mine what I needed now, but this is much more convenient. The automining is another good feature, I just hope it stops when the miners hit damp or hot stone. I'll need to be careful using it around the caverns, but I read that marker mode designations will stop automining.
Sporing's gone. Well, that's not too much of a problem since it give me more control over animal breeding. There's gelding too but I really don't need that too much with sporing gone. I'm less happy about animals that aren't receptive to breeding though. In one of my forts, if I'm reading the information in Therapist correctly, I've got a pig and a sheep that don't want to breed and they're my starting livestock. Unfortunately, that means I have to wait to buy fresh stock to get those industries up and running. I did just have the first human caravan stop by, and I bought fresh stock, so hopefully that'll fix the problem. At least my starting dogs, cats, and turkeys are breeding. I don't care one way or other about dwarf breeding, I keep the child cap low and the migrants bring so many kids with them that nobody's having babies in my fort anyway.
I'm kind of mixed on the new stress system. It doesn't look too different from the older happiness system, and my setup which kept my dwarves very happy is also apparently good at stress relief. But I was less than thrilled about the dwarves getting horrified over killing goblins. I think I'm going to switch to a a cage heavy trap system and use my old pitting strategy to harden them against anti-goblin atrocities. The approach was simple: after stripping them of armor and weapon, I drop them down a 6 or 7 z-level shaft where my soldiers wait to kill them. The fall isn't enough to kill them unless they land on their heads, and usually they break 2 or 3 limbs which makes it harder to fight back.
I'm not overly pleased with FPS either. The first 40.25 fort has slowed to 10 FPS and I'm only in my third year. I think some of it's population related, I set the population cap at 150, and that's far too many dwarves. There's too many kids and idlers, and I don't really need that many dwarves either. The FPS counter seemed to take some hits every time I got a new migration wave, but I also don't know how much digging and production is affecting things either. I'm testing a new fort at a 100 cap to see how well that works. I honestly don't need a lot of dwarves to run things comfortably, so I think a cap from 80 - 100 will probably suffice. I was doing some reading up on topics from around the release of 40.x and everyone seemed to be having FPS problems at first though. Some of it is likely from an active world and unavoidable. Other problems might have been fixed through code optimization during the different releases of 40.x Again, this is one of the things I'm testing by trying different versions of the game to see what version of DF this computer can handle.
I need some information on how to set up tree fruit gathering, since the wiki isn't being helpful. I know I need to set up a plant gathering zone for the dwarves to pick fruit. Do I need one for each individual tree, or can I have one central zone?
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Topic: Returning to DF (Read 4046 times)